A fire was going in the family room. He had taught Davey how to build one by stacking the wood the way he did his toy Lincoln Logs, like a square house around the kindling, never a pyramid. The kid now viewed making the fire as his sacred duty. Come the first frosts of November, the Beuell home was the warmest place for miles and miles.
“Dad!” Davey came running from the kitchen. “Our plan is working great. Jill is completely fooled.”
“Good news, Big Man,” Virgil said, giving his boy the secret handshake known in the entire world only by the two of them.
“I told her we’d write the Santa letters after dinner, then lay out some snacks, just like you did with me when I was little.” Davey was turning eleven in January.
Jill was setting the kitchen table, her specialty being the straightening of napkins and silverware. “My daddy is home, hooray hooray,” the six-year-old said, lining up the last of the spoons.
“He is?” Delores Gomez Beuell asked, standing as she cooked at the stove, baby Connie straddling the nooks of her elbow and hip. Virgil gave each of the women in his life a kiss.
“So he is,” Del said, pecking him back, then dishing fried potatoes with onions onto a platter and getting it to the table. Davey brought his father a can of beer from the new, huge Kelvinator and ceremonially levered the two opposing openings in the top with a church key, another sacred duty.
Dinnertime with the Family Beuell was a show. Davey was in and out of his chair—the kid never sat through a meal. Connie squirmed in her mother’s lap, content with a spoon she worked around in her mouth or banged on the table. Del cut food for the kids, wiped up spills, placed bits of mashed-up potato into Connie’s mouth, and, occasionally, had a bite herself. Virgil ate slowly, never repeating a bite of any one food, but working his fork around his plate in a circle as he enjoyed the theater that was his family.
“I’m telling ya, Santa needs only three cookies.” Davey was explaining, for Jill’s sake, the facts surrounding the evening’s expected visitor. “And he never finishes a whole glass of milk. He’s got so much to do. Right, Dad?”
“So I hear.” Virgil gave his son a wink that Davey tried to return, but he could only scrunch up the one side of his face to force one eye closed.
“Anyways, everyone leaves him the same snack.”
“Everyone?” Jill asked.
“Everyone.”
“I can’t figure out when he comes. When does he show up?” Jill needed to know.
“Not at all if you don’t touch your dinner.” Del tapped Jill’s plate with her fork and separated some of her potato from her meat. “Bites get Santa here sooner.”
“Right when we all go to bed?” Jill asked. “We have to be sleeping, right?”
“Could be anytime between bedtime and when we wake up.” Davey had answers for every one of his sister’s queries. Since he had figured out the deal with Santa over the summer, Davey had assigned himself the task of keeping his little sister a believer.
“That could be hours. If his milk sits out too long, it’ll go bad.”
“He can make it cold with just a touch! He just sticks his finger in a glass of warm milk and does a whooshy thing and boom. Cold milk.”
Jill found that fact amazing. “He must drink a lot of milk.”
After dinner Virgil and the kids did KP, Jill standing on a chair over the sink drying the forks and spoons one by one while Del was upstairs putting the baby down and grabbing a short, much-needed nap. Davey opened his father’s final can of beer for the night and set it on the telephone table right beside what was called Daddy’s Chair in the front room, by the fire. Once Virgil was sitting and sipping, Davey and Jill lay in front of the phonograph and played Christmas records. With the room lights off, the tree threw colored magic onto the walls. Jill found Virgil’s lap while her brother played the Rudolph record over and over until they knew all the words and started adding their own.
Had a very shiny nose.
“Like a lightbulb!”
Used to laugh and call him names.
“Hey, Knothead!”
When it came to the line about going down in history, they yelled out, “And arithmetic!”
Del came downstairs, laughing. “What would you goofballs make of ‘Joy to the World’?” She took a sip from Virgil’s beer before sitting in her corner of the sofa, tapping a cigarette from her leather case with the snap clasp, and lighting it with matches from the ashtray set beside the phone.
“Davey, poke that log a bit, would you?” Virgil said.
Jill perked up. “Lemme poke the fire!”
“After me. And don’t worry. Santa’s boots are fireproof.”
“I know. I know.”
After Jill took her turn stabbing the fire, Del sent the kids upstairs to change into their pj’s.
Virgil finished his beer, then went to the hall closet to pull out the portable Remington typewriter. Delores had bought the machine brand new for Virgil when he was in the Army hospital on Long Island, New York. He had typed letters to her with his one good hand until the therapists taught him to use what he called five-and-a-half-finger touch typing.
He took the writing machine out of its case on the low coffee table and rolled in two sheets of paper, one on top of the other—always two sheets so as not to damage the platen.
“Leave your messages for St. Nick or Father Christmas or whatever his name is,” he told the kids when they came back downstairs smelling of toothpaste and fresh, clean flannel.
Jill wrote hers first, one clack at a time, letter by letter, key by key.
dear santaa clas thank you for coiming again and thank you for the nurse kit and my Honey Walker I hpoe you give me bothh merry chirstmas I love you JILL BEUELL
For his letter Davey insisted on his own separate piece of paper. He told Jill that he didn’t want to confuse Santa. Getting the two pages into the typewriter and lined up straight took him a few tries.
12/24/53
Dear Santa Clause. My sister Jill believes in you and so. Do I. still. You know what I want for this chrismas and believe me you have NEVER DISAPPOINTMED ME..!’’Hear is some cold milk of course and ‘snack cakes’ thar tar also called cookies. Next year you have to bring presents for baby Connie beecause she will be old enuogh by then Okay????? if the milek is warm make it cold with yuor finger.
David Amos Beuell
Davey left his letter hanging out of the typewriter carriage, posing the machine to face the fireplace, where Santa was sure to see it.
“You guys should arrange your presents in piles under the tree. To make things simple come morning,” Virgil said. Santa always left the wished-for presents that were his responsibility unwrapped on Christmas morning, ready for immediate play, so Virgil and Del would have time for their morning coffee. The family gifts—from Uncle Gus and Aunt Ethel, from Uncle Andrew and Aunt Marie, from Goggy and Pop, from Nana and Leo, from as far away as Urbana, Illinois, and as close as Holt’s Bend—had been collecting under the tree, wrapped in colorful paper, for days, growing with almost every stop at the village post office.
Once twin stacks of gifts labeled DAVEY and JILL had been built up, the kids put the records back in their sleeves and the albums back up on the shelf. Del asked Jill to tune the big cabinet radio to the Christmas Eve Programs, for seasonal music that was not about a deer with a red nose.
Cookies had been baked on December 23. Jill pulled them out of the Kelvinator and arranged them on a plate while Davey poured milk into a tall glass, then they carried the snacks to the coffee table, setting them beside the Remington. From then on it was a waiting game. Davey added another log to the fire as Jill reacquainted herself with her father’s lap while the radio played Christmas carols celebrating wise men and holy nights and the birth of Jesus.